Thanks! Not too surprised that others have traveled this same path. It looks like it may be doable.

Just be aware that Microsoft can change its service addresses on a whim, and that there are reports of Windows 10 circumventing the hosts file altogether. If you block anything, make sure to do it elsewhere in your network.

There's another Windows 10 feature I discovered: it circumvents VPNs, unless you've gone through some effort to prevent it to. Worse still, it's not immediately evident this is happening at all. Instead of neatly sending DNS requests over the VPN, like previous versions of Windows do, it sends it out on any and all available network connections available. This is supposedly to ensure the quickest DNS response, but it tends to utterly destroy a lot of the protection granted by the VPN. I don't quite see the gains offsetting the cost.

To me, it's a simple nuisance, but some people in less scrupulous political climates might literally get killed over the feature.

We (USA) broke up Standard Oil when it had close to 90% of the market back in 1911 creating 5 smaller oil companies to compete against each other. Again, in the 1980's we broke up AT&T creating 7 baby-bells thereby eliminating the monopoly and again we had competition.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Tweeter, so on, either approach or exceeded the 90% mark in their respective markets. Sherman Act is there to control monopolies from engaging in anti-competitive behavior or misuse its monopolistic power. It is perhaps time to assess whether it is in the interest of consumers to invoke the Sherman Act. At the very lease, it may bring some humility back to these all-powerful emperors running these tech behemoths.

Just be aware that Microsoft can change its service addresses on a whim, and that there are reports of Windows 10 circumventing the hosts file altogether. If you block anything, make sure to do it elsewhere in your network.

What is all this stuff from CLOUDFLARENET .... Oops, I guess that one needs to stay.

Anyway, I'm just running DD-WRT in a Linksys router. Seems simple enough to telnet in and set it up. I have not been able to get the command window to stick yet. I can save it and tell it to run it at boot. But after a power cycle, telnet in and the iptables are not set correctly. Guessing it is just lack of sleep and something stupid.

Warms my heart to stick it to them... This what happens when you press a few keys on the windows 10 calculator...

Unfortunately for my day to day work I *need* windows. Fortunately I've been virtualizing it since Windows 95, so I've kinda learned to work around stuff where required.

On the whole I've always found Windows was *more* reliable under virtualization and (at least in pre-Win8 versions) often snappier. There are a few follow-on advantages to that :- You can completely deny it access to the outside world.- You can easily and frequently snapshot the machine so you can install/test software and roll back with zero consequences.- No issues with Virus/Trojan because of the first 2 points.- Hardware upgrades on a whim with zero driver issues (and consequential WGA headaches if you actually run that stuff).- No issues with updates or the OS trying to do things behind your back.

Certainly not for everybody, but for my use case it's a super low maintenance option that has far more advantages than disadvantages. Like I said though, I've been using Linux on the desktop full time since about 1996 with windows in a box (TrelOS it was back then from memory, then Win4Lin, Qemu with the KQEMU proprietary accelerator, and now QEMU/KVM). I played with VirtualBox for a while and I've had a good go at VMWare, but always got better results *for my use case* using the Qemu based stuff.

I did spend quite a bit of time watching Windows 10 in a box to see what it spoke to, but I gave up after a while as even with all the published tweaks there was no way to keep it quiet.Fortunately the software I have that will only run on stuff later than 7 will run on 8.1 and I've got a nice trimmed SOE of that which behaves nicely in a VM so I haven't had to use 10 in anger yet. It did seem to get upset and leave a lot of gumph in the event logs when it couldn't phone home, particularly as it could resolve DNS.

Besides being another "new" spinoff, I saw where they were attempting to make it stable, what benefits does it offer? I was looking to see if I could find some sort of matrix comparing the various flavors. I've been running DD-WRT for some time and it's been rock solid. I really don't do much with it beyond just using it.

My biggest gripe has been the auto-rebooting. I got Win10 first on my laptop, and noticed that it would even *wake itself out of hibernation* while in my backpack to start applying updates. Actually, it would spin and spin for an hour, then it would fail to hibernate again.

As a result, the battery would be totally flat when I powered it on the next day even though it started with 90% the previous day when I'd put it into hibernation.

Win10 Enterprise was said to have policy options for disabling this completely ridiculous behavior. I picked up Win10 Enterprise for my desktop PC, set group policy, and figured my days of losing work were over... but not so!It turns out that even in Enterprise, Windows actually ignores its own group policies set to disable auto rebooting. Eventually people found out how to hack the registry to work around this.

Thus began a 2 year game of cat and mouse where Microsoft would change the reboot policy behavior and schemes with every major update, breaking the fixes before it. My desktop PC would wake itself at 2am out of hibernation and burn 100% cpu applying updates, then never shut off. Eventually after enoguh corporate customers and important people reminded MS how idiotic they were, the problems lessened.

However, I still have to physically remove my laptop battery when it's stored in hibernation or I risk updates ruining it and melting the bottom of my backpack.

My biggest gripe has been the auto-rebooting. I got Win10 first on my laptop, and noticed that it would even *wake itself out of hibernation* while in my backpack to start applying updates. Actually, it would spin and spin for an hour, then it would fail to hibernate again.

As a result, the battery would be totally flat when I powered it on the next day even though it started with 90% the previous day when I'd put it into hibernation.

Win10 Enterprise was said to have policy options for disabling this completely ridiculous behavior. I picked up Win10 Enterprise for my desktop PC, set group policy, and figured my days of losing work were over... but not so!It turns out that even in Enterprise, Windows actually ignores its own group policies set to disable auto rebooting. Eventually people found out how to hack the registry to work around this.

Thus began a 2 year game of cat and mouse where Microsoft would change the reboot policy behavior and schemes with every major update, breaking the fixes before it. My desktop PC would wake itself at 2am out of hibernation and burn 100% cpu applying updates, then never shut off. Eventually after enoguh corporate customers and important people reminded MS how idiotic they were, the problems lessened.

However, I still have to physically remove my laptop battery when it's stored in hibernation or I risk updates ruining it and melting the bottom of my backpack.

Other than that, W10 works well for me

Precisely this. At work we moved one of our PCs to Win10 before IT adopted it and it was a nightmare - I would say the problem is, as you mentioned, not auto-rebooting but auto powering up/wake up. I also had the same issue with flattened batteries out of nowhere only to find out the damn OS was doing the favor of leaving "All your files are exactly where you left them".

Since after IT adopted it and my notebook was "updated", I have noticed an improvement in this BS. Also, since the reboots are mandated by IT after applying updates (even on my previous beloved Win7 laptop), I can't distinguish anymore what is Win10 exclusive.

Oh well... Hopefully this gets sorted out by the time I am forced to make a decision.

Oh, the "whys" of the datasheets... The information is there not to be an axiomatic truth, but instead each speck of data must be slowly inhaled while carefully performing a deep search inside oneself to find the true metaphysical sense...

i type this on my Debian laptop while finding the entire situation hilarious.for the record, i'v been using linux since everybody was raving about that new o.s. called windows2k that had install cd's that could explode in your drive!!

As I mentioned, NI did or still does support LINUX but the last time I checked, it was very limited. Similar to their 64-bit version.

I used to run the Altera tools on a Sun. I wonder if Xilinx, Altera, Lattice, fully support them now.

MPLABX runs on it but it seems I ran into a problem with their hardware under LINUX. That could have been me.

Looking at my spectrum analyzer, they have an API that will work with Ubuntu 14.04 but not a turn key copy of their main software.

I have ran OpenOffice and would be willing to use it. Last I looked, they did not have a flavor that supported Project.

Any sort of CAD packages I looked at for LINIX were not usable. Again, it has been a few years since I looked at it.

If Windows went away, I am sure the tool providers would switch to some flavor of LINUX. Maybe they are waiting to see if one flavor dominates over the others. Anytime I have looked, the tool suppliers are VERY specific about what it would work on and no support. It seemed more like throwing a bone to the academics groups that an all out effort to support a different OS then Windows. Can't say I blame them. Better to support the majority when it comes to business.

PC ran all yesterday with no applications but Wireshark. My second attempt has some impact but eventually they got through. I even saw some data to Inktomi Corp . Maybe the whois database is out of date. Akamai was another that was really bad and I started adding them as well. Even Google and Yahoo seem to have a few hooks. I let the new tables run through the night and nothing new came up.

As I mentioned, NI did or still does support LINUX but the last time I checked, it was very limited. Similar to their 64-bit version. I used to run the Altera tools on a Sun. I wonder if Xilinx, Altera, Lattice, fully support them now. MPLABX runs on it but it seems I ran into a problem with their hardware under LINUX. That could have been me.

No problems with tools from Altera, Xilinx and Lattice (yes, I tried all three of them) on Linux Mint 18 (I'd assume the same on Ubuntu).Again, no problems with MPLABX. It's more snappy and usable on my two core sub-notebook with Linux than on my office-work computer with quad core i7 under windows. Hardware tools do work with no problem at all, at least the ones I tried - PicKit3, ICD3 and Curiosity boards.

I have ran OpenOffice and would be willing to use it. Last I looked, they did not have a flavor that supported Project.

Linux lacks of good project management tools. You can download ProjectLibre. It's an old tool that was resurrected this year. Jan 2017 version works fine (Linux and Win). Interface is not pretty but features are ok. (You can open and save ms project files) https://sourceforge.net/projects/projectlibre/

I didn't find any good and free web based app to edit ms project files.

i type this on my Debian laptop while finding the entire situation hilarious.for the record, i'v been using linux since everybody was raving about that new o.s. called windows2k that had install cd's that could explode in your drive!!

That's hilarious, except that a lot of the major engineering software packages aren't available on Debian, or any other Linux flavour. Why do you think people like us put up with Microsoft? It's certainly not because they have never considered Linux.